Why I Wouldn’t Buy The Sims 4

The Sims 4 has been announced by EA and Maxis and now we know that it’ll be released in 2014. As a longtime fan of the series, I’m actually pretty excited by this announcement. The Sims 3 has been a pretty big success despite the constant bugs and the fact that it took outside modders to get many players games working properly. Regardless of the constant patching and modding updates needed to play The Sims 3 without crashing, people are excited and wary for The Sims 4. There has been a lot of discussion going on about what features fans would like to see. I on the other hand, would like to focus on what features I do not want to see in this game. So here it is my list of features that would force me to wash my hands of the Sims series.

Adding SimCity features

Don’t get me wrong I enjoy SimCity but I don’t want it mixed up with The Sims 4. There are some that would like to see multiple playable cities that our Sims would be able to travel almost freely to each. And while I understand the desire I don’t see it ending well. Sims at this point can travel to different location using expansions like World Adventures or University Life and already traveling can take an inordinate amount of time depending on your computer. The Sims 3 already requires a lot of CPU power and adding more complex features like those we see in SimCity can turn an already potentially lagging game into a nightmare.

Needing other players

We’ve already seen bits of this feature added with expansions like Showtime, where in order to raise your Sims level you have can send them to other players’ games. Even when this works it can be a pain and more often than not your friends Sims doesn’t show up to your concert. EA/Maxis has slowly been adding more social features to The Sims 3 so it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that other aspects would force you to rely on friends in order to advance. For example your Sims is an Interior Decorator; to advance in that career past level 5 you have to send your Sims to other players’ games. And you’ll have to do it every single day otherwise your Sims will never advance during play. Yeah not a fan.

Micro transactions

EA has been all about micro transactions in the Sims series. The Sims Social was one giant micro transaction and you can already purchase objects from the store during Sims 3 gameplay. Well what if that continued? Yes I understand that it’s ridiculous but it does feel like a natural progression since we allow so much of it already. What if in The Sims 4 you need micro transactions just to advance through the game. For $1.99 you can unlock new characters or houses. For $2.99 you can unlock extra family slots. I think I’d write off the series completely.

And finally, continued reliance on the modding community

Don’t get me wrong I love the modding community. In fact most of my Sims, clothes, houses and objects comes from the modders. I even have mods that help me play my game. However with news coming out that the most prominent Sims 3 modder, the one whose allowed most of us to even start our game fixing problems that patching constantly causes, is retiring after the last Sims 3 expansion comes out how can we trust EA and Maxis not to continue making the same mistakes. Each time an expansion comes out new bugs follow with it. And sometimes weeks before they get around to fixing it the modders come to save the day. I’m not sure that the fans of the series will be willing to tolerate this happening with The Sims 4 especially if there’s no guarantee that modders can fix it.

So that’s it my short list of thing that would cause me to put down The Sims forever. At this point I’m not sure what we can expect to see with The Sims 4 as there really isn’t that much info being released. All I hope is that this advancement in the series fixes the problems that The Sims 3 has and continues to expand on all the good things that the game has going for it.

Author

Ms. Barthelemy has mastered all there is to know about the space time continuum and frequently spends way to much time debating why the official Zelda timeline is wrong, because it is. She also spends way too much time building houses and awesome kingdoms in the Sims 3 and is dedicating her life to creating Skyrim. When she's not wasting her precious youth she spends time bonding with friends and family watching all the sports and spamming GRR Martin about finishing the Song of Ice and Fire series even though he might kill a Stark.